Nostalgic Garden

Soribada is one of the first music download services in Korea. It was much like Napster initially. Soribada simply provided a P2P client for users to share mp3 files. Its popularity was explosive. And of course the RIAA equivalent of Korea did not like Soribada at all. Much like Napster, it was forced to change its service and now it operates more like iTunes Store. Users pay monthly fee or buy tokens in exchange for mp3 files.

But why buy mp3s? Because I love listening to music and hunting down high quality mp3s on Rapidshare forums proved to be a huge waste of time for me.

Being a Korean site, its intended exclusively for Koreans living in Korea. This means Paypal was not a payment option. Instead there would be a payment plugin issued by one of the major banks running on ActiveX controller. So whoever wanted to get music from Soribada had to use Windows. For a Mac user like me, there was no work around on this obstacle. Bootcamp was not an option. Who would run Windows just to buy music? Certainly not me. I tried using Parallels Desktop, but the Active X plugin crashed Windows.

Well that was a year ago. Recently Soribada introduced a service just for foreigners like me and surprisingly became Mac friendly. 

Basically there is a separate payment method that does not ask you for any personal information other than email and credit card. That’s right, no need to sign up for the service. Just your email and credit card. I bought the “Unlimited streaming for a month and 40 downloads” package for less than 10 bucks using my Canadian credit card. Within minutes, I received an email with an authorization code.

The download process is a breeze. No need to install a client. It’s all web-based, and Active-f’gging-X free. And it doesn’t suck at all. The site is very responsive. Once you find a song you’d like, Soribada streams the song to the web-player located at the top of the page. If you like the song, you can simply click the download button. This is a very neat idea. I actually get to listen to the whole song in high quality before I purchase the song. Better yet, I just queue up a bunch of songs and listen to them while I work. If I hear something good, I just download it and move to my iTunes library. There is no need to hunt for album art or missing tag info.  They are already in place.

Try it. You will like it

Tomorrow is mother’s day
wish I can just get on the highway
but I’m not even gonna make halfway
’cause Vancouver is like 4354 kilometers away
and it’s not like I have a car anyway
hell I even lost my bicycle in 2A
(don’t ask me how pigs flew / ’cause I’ve got no clue)

I’m not quite digging the new model, but I still like the style.